Making the Case for Virtual Audiences: Unleashing Insights in a Creative Agency

In this Article

• The Current Agency Dilemma
• A Solution to the Problem
• How Church+State Leveraged Virtual Audiences
• Are Virtual Audiences the Future of Market Research?

In the past couple of years, Generative AI has disrupted every industry – market research included. As we continue to grapple with its uses and implications, one topic keeps coming up: synthetic respondents. Do they work? Are they reliable? When does it make sense to employ them? What role should they play in our day-to-day work?

In our continued commitment to innovation, Sago wanted to explore these questions and better understand what the future is for virtual audiences in market research. We partnered with Church+State, a top creative agency, to run some experiments and better understand the role synthetic respondents may have in our future.

The Current Agency Dilemma

To begin our exploration, it was critical to understand the key challenges facing a creative agency like Church+State. Three main struggles were identified:

1. Winning Business

Creative agencies are constantly pitching to win new business against steep competition – and more is being asked of every pitch with less reward at the end of it. To stand out, agencies need to find a way to provide a highly customized pitch to improve the odds of winning, but without overinvesting or giving away intellectual property. It’s an efficiency battle.

2. Keeping Business

It’s never enough to win business, it must be kept. For an agency, that requires consistently bringing something meaningful to the table – especially as more agencies collaborate for a single client. Content is always on, so research should be too – but timelines, budgets, and the typical research process don’t always make this feasible. So how does a creative agency manage to act quickly yet thoroughly, stay strategic, and constantly uncover insights for immediate improvements?

3. Clients Staying Current

Working at a creative agency means a constant partnership with the client, and clients have constantly evolving needs. Most will have more than one target persona, creating a heightened need for more personalization. Providing a client with real-time insights is far more vital than insights from three months ago, and those insights need to be about specific people and solving specific problems. It’s not enough simply to have a huge quantity of data – true insights require a massive investment in infrastructure, a complete overhaul of process, ever-changing privacy concerns, and the dependency on other departments to help marketing do it. Keeping clients current is truly a moving target.

Essentially, creative agencies need smarter, deeper, more insightful work at faster speeds for less money.

A Solution to the Problem

Once Church+State outlined the problems it faced, we at Sago set about finding a solution. Enter virtual audiences.

What is a virtual audience? Put most simply, a virtual audience is an AI model that leverages LLMs but is trained on domain-specific data to simulate realistic responses from the perspective of specific consumer segments. It’s possible to generate both qualitative and quantitative responses, or to chat directly with the synthetic respondent. Virtual audiences are always available to provide insights and eliminate issues around participant privacy. And, as it would happen, a great solution to many of the challenges a top creative agency might face.

We invested in a trial of virtual audiences to allow Church+State to add a research layer in moments when the research wasn’t already taking place. Rather than replacing traditional research services, synthetic respondents provided support when timing or budget would have precluded it – a win for efficiency and decision-making alike.

How Church+State Leveraged Virtual Audiences

Once the solution was in place, Church+State went about finding numerous ways to use the new virtual audiences.

Pitching a Post-Secondary Education Client

Getting to Know Today’s Learner

• Once the target personas were created, the Church+State team members spent time learning about them. Knowing what was critical to segments within their target audience helped them to quickly build an informed environmental scan that included specific recommendations for how the client could differentiate themselves.

The Environmental Context

• While Church+State had its own assumptions about the target audience, it needed to test them to see how (or if) they rang true. Virtual audiences could create real-time personas that were reflective of a diverse and nuanced student body.

Beyond these results, the virtual audience allowed Church+State to create a more informed and precise response to the challenge outlined in the opportunity, while maintaining efficiency. The timeline for the pitch was a mere seven days, and 95 other agencies were preparing to respond. Using virtual audiences helped Church+State cut through faster and ultimately win the business.

Ongoing Client Work

Testing the Brief

• When briefs became repetitive, Church+State needed a way to intelligently “poke holes” and test what its experts thought they knew about their target. The team took the base target audience provided in its brief and expanded upon it using virtual audiences. The agency discovered that there was a potential oversimplification of the target audience and its needs. Church+State shared the new findings with the client to help develop key messaging.

Getting Deep

• With its new personas, Church+State engaged in quarterly chats with them to ask them what they thought about the client brand’s claims and service offering. This allowed the agency to not only keep up as the audience evolved and respond appropriately, but also to stress test its creative ideas accordingly.

On the whole, virtual audiences allowed Church+State to break free of the one-and-done strategic deep dive typical of most agencies, and instead provide key insights on an ongoing basis. In turn, its clients are better informed of and prepared to address consumer behavior or attitudes that may have shifted virtually overnight.